That is so great you are finishing a PhD! Keep pursuing it, and take it from someone who wishes they did the same!Yeah, the "can't someone just pay me to look for cool shit?" is the best part of the job... Hiking around the southern AZ desert as a college kid looking for archaic projectile points (helping a grad student on her diss project) is what sold me on the whole idea. I'm finishing up a Ph.D. program at ASU, pretty well burnt out on the whole discipline by this point. I mean, I still love the topic and related historical/anthropological/sociological issues, BUT academia in general and institutions like ASU specifically make me want to blow my brains out. I've been groomed to become a professor, but have no interest in pursuing that route... Over the last 12-13 years mostly I've worked for private companies doing CRM (salvage) work here in AZ and neighboring states. Currently I work for a couple professors over at ASU (BOOORING - but it beats swinging a pick/shovel in the summer in Phoenix). My modest computer skills (programming & database/document management & remote sensing/GIS) are rather rare in archaeology, which has got me a lot more work over the past few years than my fieldwork experience. Ideally someday relatively soon I'll move into a research faculty position somewhere in the southwest or CA, and get to focus coding models/simulations to help better understand some of the major concerns of the discipline (I'm specifically interested modeling the evolution of early market-based economies) and help better interpret the mundane data (pottery, chipped stone, etc) we've collected. That's the short version, anyway :-)
I also work for ASU as support staff, and like you I have some degree of tech skills (as very modest as those skills are, I still am paid far less than fair market value~but I am certainly not complaining cuz I am just grateful to have a job right now!), and totally know what you are talking about with the ASU academia environment. If the public only knew of the unprofessional pettiness, squabbling, and back biting that goes on behind closed doors, the double dipping of retired faculty who come back as "consultants," incompetents who waste thousands on equipment they don't need (as in researchers buying new laptops every year because they have grant money to burn, while still hording last year's model and allowing their son\daughter to use ASU property at home rather than sharing it with other less well-funded programs within their own college), or even just the grossly over paid salaries of some faculty who never show up and claim to be "working remotely" on some beach in San Diego, while their assistants\staff who barely make minimum wage do all the work for them, so that these faculty can get all the credit AND pay increases~even in a time where pay increases for state workers are NOT supposed to happen. Yeah, don't get me started. It is sad how one can be soured on a discipline one truly loves, because of the politics, pecking order, and petty fiefdoms created by eccentric tenured baby-boomer faculty who think they are royalty. I did not study in the anthropology field, but one of my undergrad degrees is history~ a somewhat related field, with a similar academic environment. Unfortunately, I have not yet pursued grad work in history, a subject which I love, partly because of the politics I've witnessed, and it kind of turned me off.
